The Endless Thread team is excited to introduce a new mini-series: Tales from the Crypto, or three windows into the wild world of cryptocurrency. It’s a landscape ripe for investors, gamblers, opportunists, and academic investigators — both online and offline. At every turn, our hosts and producers have turned to experts to make sense of this volatile, ever expanding terrain.
In the series’ first installment, co-hosts Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson dive into a viral tweet about NFTs aiding Ukrainians with the war effort against Russia, as well as plans for a crypto island paradise that was never meant to be.
Show notes
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Full Transcript:
This content was originally created for audio. The transcript has been edited from our original script for clarity. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.
Ben Brock Johnson: Where were you on the morning of February 27th, 2022?
Amory Sivertson: (Laughs.)
Jathan Sadowski: (Laughs.) This is a great deposition now.
Amory: Ben and I are grilling a guy named Jathan Sadowski.
I have reason to believe that you were on Twitter.
Jathan: I was making a tweet that soon made a lot of people really mad at me is what I was doing.
Ben: Ah yes, the thrill of kickstarting the social media outrage machine. Like the Mad Hatter’s first cup of tea in the morning. Loki — God of mischief — swingin’ his legs out of bed.
Amory: And on what topic was Jathan about to tweet and live in infamy for? Not his opinion on the new Amazon Lord of the Rings TV series or making guacamole with peas. Don’t do that, guys. Not The Dress. No. Jathan was about to tweet about the most popular topic in Elon Musk’s tweet replies.
Ben: You guessed it. Crypto.
Jathan: Instead of selling war bonds, Ukraine has a golden opportunity to mint NFTs of unique and important moments in the conflict. Selling these NFTs will fund defense while generating community. World War III will be Web3 native. The winner will embrace the power of decentralized networks.
Ben: You can probably divide the people who read and heard Jathan’s tweet into two categories: people who understand terms like NFT and Web3 native and decentralized networks. And people like Amory.
Amory: (Laughs.) You know, that’s fair. But not anymore. I’m an expert. No, I’m not an expert. I’m crawling my way towards competency now.
Ben: (Laughs.) Yeah, me too. Sort of? Experts and non-experts on the various vagaries of cryptocurrency seemed to equally love Jathan’s comment about using crypto to support Ukraine though.
Amory: Because his tweet reached the stratosphere.
Jathan: And at some point, this tweet escaped my own kind of, you know, my own part of Twitter where people know who I am. And it got picked up by some really big accounts in particular, some really big YouTubers with like hundreds of thousands of followers.
Amory: And this is where the problems started. Because Jathan was kidding.
Ben: Totally kidding. He didn’t — and doesn’t — actually think that cryptocurrency — or the many technologies that the concept of digital currency has birthed — should really be involved in wars. In fact?
Amory: So I want to do a little word association. When I say cryptocurrency, you say…
Jathan: Scam.
Amory: I’m NFT Sivertson. Oh, do I really want to say that?
Ben: Yeah! Yeah!
Amory: What does that make you?
Ben: I’m Bitcoin Johnson. And…
Read More: www.wbur.org